The article "Who started it?" delves into the origins of the cryptocurrency market, currently valued at over $2 trillion, tracing its ancestry back to virtual games like World of Warcraft and Second Life in the early 2000s. Brock Pierce, a former child actor and 2020 US presidential candidate, recognized that gamers were willing to purchase in-game tokens to advance, rather than earn them, leading him and William Quigley to create a marketplace for these tokens, which is now valued at $200 billion. Pierce employed hundreds of people in China and South America to play video games and sell the earned tokens to Western customers, asserting that intangible assets are not worthless.
The real start of bitcoin came in October 2008 when an unknown author using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper outlining proposals for a new technology called blockchain and a digital currency named bitcoin, which could be "mined" and had a capped supply of 21 million units. In January 2009, Nakamoto mined the first bitcoin. The first real-world transaction occurred in May 2010 when someone paid 10,000 bitcoin (worth over $600 million today) for two pizzas. Bitcoin's price first bubbled to $32 before collapsing to around $2 in 2011, putting it on the map.
By 2011, trading platforms like Mt.Gox emerged, catering to retail investors, especially in Asia, who had a background in gaming. These platforms handled 70% of bitcoin trades by 2014. The 2013 Greek debt crisis spurred wealthy investors to buy digital coins as a hedge, marking the first time bitcoin was influenced by macroeconomic events. In 2013, the Winklevoss twins filed the first application for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund, and stablecoin Tether, the first to link digital currencies with fiat money, went live. Ethereum launched in 2015, playing a crucial role in today's crypto markets with its ability to carry data in its code, forming the basis for decentralized finance markets, now worth $236 billion.
Bitcoin's profile soared in 2017, surpassing $20,000, and initial coin offerings became popular, but 2018 brought the "crypto winter." The mood shifted in March 2020 with the pandemic, as hedge funds and family offices, attracted by bitcoin's limited supply, entered the market. This led to a narrative shift, positioning bitcoin as a digital equivalent of gold for some. Billionaire hedge fund managers, institutional investors, banks, and figures like Elon Musk further fueled the rally. Bitcoin, volatile but on an upward trend, rose from around $0.08 in 2010 to just under $67,000 in October 2021. The past 18 months have seen an explosion in cryptocurrency popularity, with new assets like NFTs thriving and the emergence of blockchains like Cardano, Solana, and Polkadot aiming for greater efficiency.
